For me, the arts has always been sort of my saving grace.

Solar power, wind power, the way forward is to collaborate with nature - it's the only way we are going to get to the other end of the 21st century.

I started an all-girl punk band when I was 14, and I was the drummer, not the singer.

I do love one-upmanship sometimes, like when you see kids breakdancing and who can do the best tricks. It's common, it's in our nature as animals, like the birds of paradise who've got the best feathers and that sort of stuff. But it's fun when it's impulsive and it's about fun.

Come on, I'm from Iceland; I don't do hip-hop.

The English eat all sorts of birds - pigeons, ducks, sparrows - but if you tell them you eat puffin, you might as well come from Mars.

There is such a big chunk of me that is David Attenborough. I think he is my biggest inspiration.

With a small town mentality, you make a decision very early on as to whether you are going to do everything by the book or just go your own way and not care.

Living in a capital in Europe but still surrounded by mountains and ocean, my relationship to music was strongest walking to school and back. I would sing to myself and very quickly started mapping out my melodies to landscapes - at the time I just thought it was very matter of fact, a common thing to do.

In elections in Iceland, I have always been an abstainer. It seems like politics is such a small bundle of self-important people, who don't have much to do with things I'm interested in.

Most people in Iceland are blonde and blue-eyed. I was nicknamed 'China girl' in school 'cos they thought I looked Asian.

With my projects, I really like the extreme high-tech stuff, but I also like the other end, the acoustic things. So it seems like those meet on an iPad, where you make shapes but the sounds coming out of it are really acoustic.

The good thing about Pro Tools is you can actually hear what you're working on, so it doesn't just become this intellectual idea. But Pro Tools can be dangerous, too. It can make things sterile.

I went to music school, and I guess I was a difficult, know-it-all type of student.

Since I was a kid, I always wanted to figure out how to make a bass line that was a pendulum - like, gravity would control it, and then you could make it play different notes.

Nature hasn't gone anywhere. It is all around us, all the planets, galaxies and so on. We are nothing in comparison.

In Reykjavik, Iceland, where I was born, you are in the middle of nature surrounded by mountains and ocean. But you are still in a capital in Europe. So I have never understood why I have to choose between nature or urban.

Nature has always been important to me. It has always been in my music.

I think connecting natural elements and musicology is probably pretty idiosyncratic of me, so it is hard to imagine anyone else going down that route.

The funeral business is so manipulative emotionally. I would want to be thrown into the sea or burned - something that's not a big hassle.

I think religion is a mistake - I'm exhausted by its self-righteousness. I think atheists should start screaming for attention like religious folks do.

I went through an anti-Establishment phase and thought we should get everything for free.

When I was a punk teenager, I rebelled because lots of people in Iceland think that foreigners are evil and that if you don't wear woolen hats and eat sheep, you're betraying your heritage.

In order to actually have a touchscreen in front of me and somehow still be connected to nature, I needed to be able to incorporate natural elements into the song structures. Because that's always been my song-writing accompaniment: nature.